Early in this compelling debut, Clare Wald, an ageing famous writer, is talking to a younger man at her house in South Africa's Western Cape: "You look fashionable," she says dismissively. Flanery describes how "she draws her lips back on the final syllable, her teeth part. There's a flicker of grey tongue."

This mixture of restrained dialogue and faintly disturbing observation is typical. Wald is addressing Sam Leroux, her recently appointed biographer, who has returned to his native South Africa to work on the book. After a home-invasion by masked gunmen, Wald has moved to a compound in an exclusive neighbourhood with a high wall and "barbed wire shaped and painted to mimic trained ivy".

Wald's life has been deeply embroiled in the events and upheavals of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. Her daughter, Laura, a "journalist until she became wholly invested in the armed struggle", disappeared, while her sister Nora was murdered. As the book unfolds, and Leroux's own connection to Wald is revealed, we are forced to consider and then reconsider Clare's role in these events.

The novel has four, often contradictory narrative strands: "Sam" is told from Leroux's perspective; "Clare" charts Wald's internal attempts to make sense of her daughter's disappearance; "Absolution" relates events in the third person; while "1989" begins at the point the lives of a young Leroux and Laura Wald first intersect.

Although the mystery of Laura's disappearance provides much of the dramatic tension, Wald is the novel's crowning achievement. Cantankerous and complex in a convincing way, she is prone to pithy pronouncements: "We all know how people suffer over the unexpected violent death of a family member … It's vivisection … It's limb loss."

At times Flanery's prose evokes Graham Greene; but Wald's search for profundity can feel a little contrived.

A literary thriller whose writing is consistently first class, Absolution might have been even better if it's structure had been more straightforward. Opinions will differ as to whether the strands of the plot are braided or merely knotted together, since, at the end, several questions remain unanswered.